WASHINGTON — Two years ago, Tom Heidenberger led a team of amateur cyclists 3,800 miles, from Los Angeles to Washington, to raise money for memorials honoring the victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Biking 180-mile days, through blistering desert heat and thin mountain air, he often considered giving up. At those times, the former airline pilot hunched his body lower over his handlebars and thought about his wife, Michele, a flight attendant with American Airlines.
He thought of the last evening they had spent together -- their daughter's 20th birthday -- and the way the setting sun had made Michele's hair glow. He thought about the last words they had said to each other, early the next morning, right before her flight took off from Dulles International Airport near Washington. She had called to remind him to pack their son's lunch; he said he'd talk to her when she got to L.A.
Within hours, terrorists had commandeered American Airlines Flight 77 and crashed it into the west side of the Pentagon.
Today, President Bush will lead the ceremony dedicating the first national memorial to the victims of that tragic day when four planes were hijacked and nearly 3,000 people were killed. The memorials at the site of the World Trade Center towers in New York and in Shanksville, Pa., where one plane crashed in a field, have been delayed by arguments over construction costs and design.
The two-acre memorial at the Pentagon -- with 184 steel-and-granite benches, each engraved with a victim's name -- is about 200 feet from the crash site, oriented along the plane's flight path.
For Heidenberger, 62, the project's completion is a complicated moment.
"Do I consider this a conclusion? No, not at all," he said. "I was there yesterday, and what gave me the greatest satisfaction was watching three or four kids sitting on a bench, and it could have been their grandparent or a relative, but they had an opportunity to remember. In a very happy sense, you remember."
In the week preceding today's dedication, that is exactly what the victims' friends and family members did.
Seven years ago, Michael Petrovich was an Army specialist based at the Pentagon. Now a chef in Toronto, he brought his wife to visit the memorial Tuesday.
"That was our boss," he told his wife, pointing to a small smiling face on a board of photographs just outside the memorial area. Pointing to another picture, he said: "He was a really nice guy."
